Joyfulmind Blog

​WEIRDO MEDITATORBack in the day when I started as a meditator, meditation was still regarded as a slightly suspicious navel-gazing endeavour.

You needed to be brave to persevere amid the raised eyebrows. Eyebrows that were raised even higher at the amount of time you were carving out for practice. The early nights you were having.

Dangerous!

God forbid, she even missed the fancy-dress party! Unheard of.KEEP GOINGBut I didn’t care. I was feeling tooo damn good.

Not just healthy, but strangely more intelligent as well.

Smarter.

Could it have something to do with the meditation?

(Or more to do with the drugs and hectic lifestyle of late teens and early-20s wearing off??)RESPECTABLE AT LASTIt’s edifying, some decades later, that meditation is now mainstream. It’s legit. Above-board. Respectable.

And eyebrows have changed too: they’ve gotten thicker and are professionally shaped these days.

But eyebrows aren’t the only things to thicken. Word has it (“studies show”) that the brains of longterm meditators thicken in the grey matter of the prefrontal cortex. The brainy part of the brain.

So there.

Maybe I really was getting smarter.MEDITATION MAKES YOU SMARTERA main factor in leveraging the status of meditation from delinquent to desirable is the scientific scrutiny to which it has been subject over the last 10-15 years.